According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Terra employee Chris Amani has been serving as the company’s CEO for months.
At the moment, Do Kwon, co-founder of Terraform Labs, is facing possible extradition to South Korea or the US from a Montenegro cell.
In the meantime, Terra has appointed a new CEO to take over, while it’s believed that Kwon is still the principal Terra shareholder.
According to the WSJ yesterday, Amani has worked for Terra since 2021, having served as chief operating officer and chief financial officer. Prior to this, he was a CEO at Humanity, a scheduling solution provider.
According to his profile on LinkedIn, Amani has been working as Terra’s CEO since April of this year.
Amani has stated that Terra is not planning to launch any stablecoins and will focus on other products, saying: “We have a vision for how we could salvage this, even though I think it’s going to be hard and it’s going to take a long time.”
The new CEO is also hopeful that Do Kwon could be cleared of charges. In the meantime, Terra will steam on in his absence.
Collapse of Terra
Last year, Terra’s stablecoin, TerraUSD (UST), lost its US dollar peg which resulted in widespread damage to the crypto market and it wiped out approximately $40bn in value, causing several established crypto companies to go bankrupt.
Prior to that, LUNA was a top 10 crypto by market capitalisation while its algorithmic stablecoin, UST was the second largest stablecoin behind USDT and USDC.
Police then began investigations into Kwon and co-founder Daniel Shin and their alleged involvement in illegal activity in the days before and after the crash.
Last March, Do Kwon was arrested at Montenegro’s Podgorica airport while attempting to travel to Dubai along with another Terra executive Han Chang-Joon. This was over the alleged possession of falsified documents. He was then sentenced to four months by a Montenegro court.
